OzSKA meeting gets a sneak peek at ASKAP science

9 April 2015

Over 100 astronomers have gathered this week at the University of Melbourne for the OzSKA meeting, a chance to discuss radio astronomy over the next decade and prepare for science with the future SKA telescope.

Over the course of the three-day meeting, discussions include SKA1 science priorities, science already underway with SKA pathfinder instruments – in particular ASKAP and the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescopes – and exploring opportunities for young scientists to become engaged with new projects and ideas.

BETA commissioning activities provide vital insights in to the intricate workings of the new telescope. As demonstrated in some of the presentations at the OzSKA meeting, this data also gives the team a sneak peek into the capabilities of the full ASKAP telescope, and lays some ground work for some fo the ten ASKAP Survey Science Projects (SSPs) chosen for the first five years of the telescope's operation.

Observations of a ‘part-time pulsar’ – an intermittent pulsar that spends long periods of time ‘turned off’ – paving a clear path to future transient work, such as VAST (Variable and Slow Transients).

The discovery of a galaxy accompanied by dark gas clouds – a promising result for the WALLABY project, which will require both sensitivity and resolution to establish how galaxies change over time.

Common to all three projects is that the results would not have been possible without the unique capabilities of BETA (and ultimately, ASKAP) and the radio-quiet environment of CSIRO’s Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) in Western Australia.

The BETA telescope was originally designed for commissioning activities, such as testing the effectiveness of phased array feed (PAF) receivers and learning about ASKAP capabilities. Through ACES, the team is already observing exotic sources, probing niche areas of parameter space and confirming theoretical predictions made with other facilities. These results provide an early insight into what BETA, and ultimately ASKAP, will be able to achieve.